Mumbai According to the data available with BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), more than 80% of the pothole-related complaints the civic body received this year has been between June 30 and July 6, after the city began receiving its first spell of heavy rains on June 30.
The civic body has received 229 pothole-related complaints in June and July this year through its “Pothole Fixit” mobile application, of which only 16 potholes have been fixed. Meanwhile, civic officials maintained that all the complaints that they receive are being attended to within 24 hours.
‘MyBMC Pothole FixIt’ is an app through which citizens can directly report pothole-related grievances. According to data extracted from the app, out of the 229 complaints that have been received through the app, 42 cases have been transferred to contractors responsible for road maintenance, 23 have already been surveyed and attended to, and only 16 have been filled and resolved completely.
“The process of filling potholes is continuous and the local ward office addresses each complaint within 24 hours after they have been registered. However, in many cases after the potholes are filled, the contractors submit their report late. Therefore, it takes us longer to update this data in the server, as a result several complaints are being shown as unattended,” said a senior civic official, requesting anonymity.
Meanwhile, citizens and activists said that the actual number of potholes on the roads of Mumbai are much more than the numbers shared by the civic body. Mushtaq Ansari, an activist who runs his Twitter handle known as ‘potholewarriors’ said that more than 2,000 potholes emerge on the roads of Mumbai daily during the monsoon.
The cost to repair each pothole is ₹4000- ₹5000, which needs to to repaired repeatedly during a single monsoon, according to Ansari. “The BMC needs to think about this seriously as every year huge amount of public money is being spent in just repairing potholes,” said Ansari.
“Few people are aware about this particular mobile app. On Twitter more than 200 complaints related to potholes are being raised every day by citizens. So, the actual number of potholes that exists in city is higher by many folds. I stay in Andheri, and I can say that between Link Road and Four Bungalows there are at least 250 potholes,” said Dhaval Shah, Andheri based resident and founder-member of the Lokhandwala Oshiwara Citizen’s Association (LOCA).
Meanwhile, civic officials also added that the problem of potholes could only be solved in entirety after the existing roads in Mumbai would be concretised. “The BMC has already taken up concretisation of roads, and the roads that we have concretised recently in the past, doesn’t see any potholes now,” said the official.
Ravi Raja, former Congress corporator and Leader of Opposition (LoP) in the BMC said that it is a clear sign of apathy when BMC’s own app shows that only 16 potholes have been filled out of more than 200 complaints.
“The municipal administration needs to take the issue of potholes seriously. They use outdated procedure of filling potholes and doing roadworks because of which the entire surface gets washed out after a brief spell of rain. In my constituency, a new road was made in May 15 and has now become filled with potholes,” said Raja.